Sunday, November 29, 2009

Bilinguals and Aphasia

This article is the most interesting article I found in doing my research. Along with Speech Pathology, I am also studying Spanish, so the issue of speech therapy and clients who are bilingual is a topic that I want to learn more about. In this article it states that there are 45,000 new cases of multilingual aphasia just in the United States. Because of the increasing number of multilingual people in the United States, there has been an increased need to find a way to help these clients. The recovery patterns of bilinguals have been studied, and while there are endless patterns that have been observed, there are six patterns that have been recognized. The six patterns are:
  1. Parallel-both languages improve to a similar extent.
  2. Differential-one language recovers better than the other
  3. Selective-only one language recovers
  4. Blended-inappropriate LM occurs
  5. Successive-complete recovery of one language comes before the other
  6. Antagonistic-the recovery of one language follows the opposite pattern of the other language

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